Author: fartheroffthewall

“The Wax Pack: On the Open Road
in Search of Baseball’s Afterlife”

The author:
Brad Balukjian

The publishing info:
University of Nebraska Press
$27.95
264 pages
Released April 1

The links:
At the publisher’s website
At Amazon.com
At BarnesNoble.com
At Powells.com
At IndieBound.org
At the author’s personal site
At the created site for the book

The review in 90 feet or less

The premise, simple: After ripping open a pack of 1986 Topps baseball cards, a guy spends 48 days during the summer of 2015 traversing America. It starts in the Bay Area, heads through Southern California, sweeping across the Southern states, a pilgrimage to Cooperstown, N.Y., left turn to Las Vegas and then to a cemetery headstone in Inglewood. That’s more than 11,000 miles through 38 states.

The goal, translucent: Interview every baseball player represented in that pack. If possible. A way to return to one’s baseball card-loving roots. Discover more about the person than just a set of numbers on the back stained in chewing gum.

The execution, perfect imperfection: Which makes this far more enriching than we could have ever imagined.

When your lineup is tracking down former Dodgers Steve Yeager and Rick Sutcliffe, former Angels Gary Pettis and Al Cowens, Hall of Famer Carlton Fisk, former All-Stars Doc Gooden, Garry Templeton, Vince Coleman and Lee Mazilli, plus — and the real gems — Richie Hebner, Jaime Cocanower, Rance Mulliniks and Randy Ready, get ready for some mixed results and unexpected pleasures.

That’s the reality of how a fundamental idea evolves, against the grain, label up.

Just as how this college-prof-turned author may have thought that once he could finally get a publisher to bite on it, he could go around the country and connect with people in promoting it.

Things can just go sideways.

Balukjian, a 39-year-old director of the National History and Sustainability Program and biology teacher at Merritt College in Oakland, has done freelance pieces for several publications, but he need not worry about his writing skills here. The stories speak for themselves, and what becomes a cathartic trip for the soul also allows him to come to grips with some other things in his life.

This is definitely an adventure where we need to do little explaining and trust that the freshness of the ride will get one quickly immersed and unable to put it down until the journey finishes. But then again, we can’t help ourselves.

The guy gets to watch kung fu movies with Templeton, play Cards Against Humanity with Cocanower, go bowling and lift weights with Ready. And listen to those who definitely have lives on the other side of the diamond experience.

With Yeager in the leadoff role of this lineup, we find him back at his Jersey Mike’s shop in Granada Hills, doting on his wife, Charlene, and with his kids, trying to quit smoking (he eventually does), and admitting: “There might be some people that think I’m tougher than I look. Don’t let the facial expression get you. I can sit there and watch a game with my glasses on and look like I’m boring a hole through you, but I might not be … Ya know, if the kids do something good, I cry.”

By the way, in that ’86 set of Topps, it started off with Boomer as a Dodger, but he was done with the team by then after 14 seasons and starting a last go-around with Seattle as a 37-year-old backup to Bob Kearney and Scott Bradley. We still can’t even get our masks around that one.

Templeton, who Balukjian tracked down in San Marcos, confides in having a daughter in April of ’74, when he was 18, two years before his debut in St. Louis. He ended up gaining full custody during her high school years when she moved to San Diego and joined the rest of the Templeton family. But the more he reveals, the better this visit gets.

It’s not unlike what Balukjian uncovers when he get around to Cowens.

He rests in Inglewood Park Cemetery across the street from the Forum. Acacia Slope, Lot 432, Grave F. The headstone: “Cowens, Husband, Father, and Grandfather, 1951-2002.” With his nickname: Ace.

“I rest his baseball card on top (of the headstone) and take a picture,” writes Balukjian, after learning far more than he might have expected after locating Cowens’ closest surviving family members.

If it takes the right person at the right time to shuffle this deck, Balukjian and all his baggage brings it to us with honesty, humor, and an inquisitive nature that allows you to ride shotgun without sharing in the expenses. When it’s over, you might wonder why you never did this yourself. Maybe you will — aside from time, money and perhaps social distancing issues?

And when it’s done, Balukjian leaves us with this sort of epiphany:

Everything changes except for this one constant: As long as you’re breathing, you will always have whatever is right in front of you. Make it count.

A very cool author Q&A

From his home in Oakland, Dr. Balukjian, a self-proclaimed bug collector, took a semester off teaching at Merritt College in Oakland (you can see his RateMyProfessor.com scores when he taught biology at Laney College) so he could focus on this book promotion, but he really hasn’t been able to spring himself loose. As the director of the Natural History & Sustainability Program at Merritt, he is trying to help coordinate ways to keep students engaged with online classes through May.
Balukjian, who also once started a Ph.D. program in Environmental Science Policy and Management at Cal-Berkley in 2006, has this classic description of himself on his website:

Brad Balukjian is a doctor, but not one who can write you a prescription (unless you’re a sick insect). He hated school when he was little, but now loves it so much that after graduating from the 23rd grade, he has moved to the other side of the desk to teach natural history at Merritt College in Oakland, California. He has strong opinions about the value of education, exposure to nature, and utility infielders from the 1980s, and is pursuing a hybrid career of teaching, writing, and research to get the word out that science is accessible and (gasp!) fun. He chose this path because he never wants to stop learning and apparently has a strong aversion to money. This is his first time writing in the third-person.

Balukjian, who once had an L.A. Times fellowship that allowed him write science stories while he was given a desk in the sports department at the old downtown building, gives us more about this book, about this process and what he wanted to achieve:

Did you think going in, most of these ex-players would accept the premise of your journey/book project and cooperate, based on how you approached this as some sort of social experiment, trying to document history as well as find a human side to a cardboard photo?

The beauty of the pack of baseball cards is to get a random sample. My favorite players were the underdog guys. This was my secret way to write about them. You could never do a book about Don Carmen or Jamie Cocanower or Randy Ready. What I tried to reinforce to all of them was that I wasn’t a traditional sports writer and this would be interesting beyond the field. That helped me. What was so rewarding and pleasant is how open they were, willing to be vulnerable.

It was also very interesting how you could incorporate your own journey into this, not just do a collection of “Whatever happened to …?” pieces that otherwise didn’t have a common thread.

I always knew this book would be tough and ambitious. I didn’t set out to write a “sports book,” but I knew it would get shelved in “sports,” where there are all sorts of biographies or stories about a particular season or a particular team. It’s rare, unless you’re that athlete who is the focus, to have the narrator integrated into the story. This becomes a mix of memoir, and baseball, and travel, and the challenge is how to keep it to 15 magazine profiles stapled together. Continue reading “Day 9 of (at least) 30 baseball book reviews for spring/summer 2020: Waxing nostalgic, beyond a journey of re-connecting with cardboard gods” →

“Swing Kings: The Inside Story of
Baseball’s Home Run Revolution”

The author:
Jared Diamond

The publishing info:
William Morrow/Harper Collins
$28.99
336 pages
Released March 31

The links:
At the publisher’s website
At Amazon.com
At BarnesAndNoble.com
At Powells.com
At IndieBound.org
At the author’s WSJ home base.

The review in 90 feet or less

Craig Wallenbrock … where have we heard that name?

Flash back to a Tom Verducci piece for Sports Illustrated – March 21, 2018, headlined “Countdown to Liftoff: How Joey Gallo and Josh Donaldson Embody Baseball’s New Era”

Verducci wrote: “A confluence of three forces has changed offenses radically: technology, analytics and failed ballplayers turned private hitting tutors —t he veritable garage-and-basement indy start-ups of this disruption. Among them: a 71-year-old college dropout cum surfer, a former high school coach, a failed independent league player, a self-taught Internet baseball junkie and a .204 hitter who was released from Class A ball after just two seasons and four home runs. Not a major league at bat among them.”

That would be Wallenbrock, whom Verducci would later refer to in the story as the “Oracle of Santa Clarita.”

You can hang more than 10 Southern California angles on him. Once the hitting coach for Art Masmanian at Mt. San Antonio College. A guy who Dodgers special assistant and former MLB standout Raul Ibanez persuaded the team to hire as a consultant in 2016, and immediately sent Chris Taylor to work with. Taylor then connects with Robert Van Scoyoc, who would become the team’s hitting coach in the dugout. (The same Van Scoyoc who went 1-for-10 as a senior at Hart High in Newhall in 2005.)

That’s how the pages of this go up and down like the Dodger Stadium escalator between the field level and press box.

Through Wallenbroch came Doug Latta, a former Fairfax High guy from UCLA and Cal Lutheran who had a batting cage in Calabasas. That’s where Justin Turner came upon Latta, thanks to former Mets teammate Marlon Byrd, who stumbled onto him first.

Before swinging from the heels to take in all that’s in this compilation by the Wall Street Journal scribe Diamond, you need to get the visual on pages viii, which is pre-prologue and introduction and subsequent 16 chapters. The chart of the “Swing Kings Family Trees” looks like the Swiss Family Robinson of baseball, with who begat whom, what  influenced what, and how it all whiffs together into what we have created in today’s game — a repurposed attack at the plate that, simply put, involves more of a upper cut than chopping down at a pitched ball.

The results can’t be denied. Continue reading “Day 8 of (at least) 30 baseball book reviews for spring/summer 2020: How to get into the swing of things? Drop and drive with this Diamond gem” →

“The Baseball Book of Why:
The Answers to Questions You’ve Always Wondered About from America’s National Pastime”

The author:
John C. McCollister

The publishing info:
Lyons Press/Globe Pequot/Rowman & Littlefield
200 pages
$16.95
Released March 20

The links:
At the publisher’s website
At Amazon.com
At BarnesAndNoble.com
At Powells.com
At IndieBound.org

The review in 90 feet or less

Why isn’t the Major League Baseball season starting today? Why am I watching the MLB Network just to see a bunch of guys talking on video screens from their homes? Why is SportsNet LA showing a replay of the Dodgers-Giants Opening Day game from 2013 — Clayton Kershow throws and shutout and hits a homer?

Why do I have an Anne Lennox song haunting my brain right now?

Question authority, we were told. Answer the call, we’re encouraged to do.

Today, we have a lot of quarantined questions that lead to awkward answers.

This paperback from McCollister — a former Lutheran pastor, federal arbitrator and fan of the game who has done many history books about the Pittsburgh Pirates and Detroit Tigers — isn’t going to blow your mind when it comes to taking up some 100 questions about why things happen in baseball as he lends his knowledge on explaining them.

It’s somewhat bias in what questions he chooses to answer — many have Pirates-centric references that seem a bit regional for a national-based publication. (Although, we admit we never knew how the Pittsburgh Pirates got their name, and now we do).

In a world of Google-the-question/quickly-find-the-result, a book like this may seem a bit naive, even outdated. It’s likely more geared for younger kids, read to them by their parent or older sibling, as a way to transfer information from one generation to another.

Still:

== Why are the Los Angeles Dodgers identified by such a strange name? That isn’t really answered here, other than “the name ‘Dodgers’ had to remain with the franchise” when Walter O’Malley moved them from Brooklyn to L.A. after the 1957 season. Did he really have to? It then explains the whole trolley dodging exercise and how sportswriters used it as a way to ID the team in the 1930s (after, of course, they were known as Bridegrooms, Grooms, Superbas and Robins before Dodgers evolved into the vernacular)

== Why did the Chicago Cubs hold spring training on Catalina Island for almost 30 years? Owner William Wrigley Jr., was instrumental in developing the land.

== Why is the National Baseball Hall of Fame’s annual award to a broadcaster called the Ford C. Frick Award? Because the former commissioner is said to have “helped foster the relationship between radio and the game of baseball.” (Still, we’d lobby to see this changed to the Vin Scully Award)

== Why hasn’t Marvin Miller, the late head of the Major League Baseball Players Association, been inducted into the Hall of Fame? That actually happened last December by vote of the Modern Baseball Era Committee, to be part of the Class of 2020. But McCollister likely didn’t know that happened.

So why have this book with its cool-to-look-at retro cover among our list of all those that might seem more procreative or compelling?

Because upon further research — the book’s back cover –McCollister never got to see this one come out.

He passed away on Dec. 19, 2019 at his home in Las Vegas.

How it goes in the scorebook

A moment of silence.

In 1983, McCollister published the book, “The Christian Book of Why,” trying to explain those burning esoteric religious questions such as “Why do Christians bake hot buns for Easter?” And “Why do Christians throw rice at weddings?”

McCollister also wrote a prayer that he called “The Baseball Invocation,” which is at the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown.

It reads:

Almighty God,
you who are called the great umpire,
in this game of life we are unsure as to what uniform we should wear.
While we may be Angels in spirit, in reality we are Giants in pride,
Dodgers of responsibility, and Tigers in ambition.
When it comes to faith, we find ourselves in the minor leagues.
When it comes to good works, we strike out.
When it comes to knowledge of your word,
we are not even sure of the ground rules.
Therefore, we are thankful for your mercy when we are in foul territory,
for your forgiveness when we commit one error after another,
for your uplifting spirit when we are in the pitfalls of a slump.
Oh God, let our game plan be your will
and our response a sell-out crowd with standing room only.
And, when our number is retired here on earth,
may we head for your home base and rejoice to hear you call out “safe.”
In the name of Him who gives the final victory to all who believe,
Christ Our Lord, Amen.

If baseball is like religion, we can find even more potential quirks to work through. So, why are stadiums referred to as cathedrals? Why does baseball have so many “threes” in its vernacular — strikes, outs, bases — while the Bible has many references to things done in “threes,” including the Holy Trinity?

Maybe there are other books done on this “why?” theme in the past. From 1989, there’s “The Answer Is Baseball A Book of Questions That Illuminate the Great Game,” by Luke Salisbury. In 2003, there was “Why Is the Foul Pole Fair: Answers to 101 of the Most Perplexing Baseball Questions,” by Vince Staten.

But today, we’ll carry around this one. To honor McCollister, who didn’t live long enough to see where are struggling. Rest in peace with your number on earth retired.

“The Cactus League: A novel”

The author:
Emily Nemens

The publishing info:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux/Macmillian publishing
$27
288 pages
Released Feb. 4.

The links:
At the publisher’s website
At Amazon.com
At BarnesAndNoble.com
At Powells.com
At Indiebound.org
At the author’s website

The review in 90 feet or less

Today would have been the final day of spring training. Tomorrow, the regular season was to start.

We grapple with that, as well as with the framework of baseball as an entry point non-fiction has historical successes mixed in with other questionable outcomes.

We dig the novel approach. But it depends on our disposition. And the author. And on what we’re trying to achieve. For example, Stephen King’s 2010 “Blockade Billy,” about the “greatest Major League player to be erased by the game,” got just more than 50 percent five-star reviews on the Amazon.com process, with an overall mark of four of five. We probably set the bar too high on expectations. We kind of sampled another last summer, with “The Proposal” by Jasmine Guillory, which uses a hook of how one those video-board moments at Dodger Stadium devolves into something that didn’t much hold our interest.

Finding a less-than-prickly way into “The Cactus League” started with catching wind of its inclusion in The Wall Street Journal’s “10 New Books You Should Be Picking Up First In 2020.” Then came a review in the L.A. Times by Kate Tuttle: “For a book about the notoriously languorous sport of baseball, this is a quick and often thrilling read. For a debut novel, it’s remarkably self-assured.”

Cool. Grap a Cactus Cooler and we’re in.

Nemens, a 36-year-old first-time author and editor at the Paris Review, sets up nine somewhat independent stories – think of nine innings – that eventually interconnect around the Scottsdale spring training existence of the Los Angeles Lions.

It’s 2011, and the recession is still a thing. If you need a star player to pin any of this on, it’s outfielder Jason Goodyear, a recent American League MVP runner-up and Gold Glover. (It shouldn’t have one connecting dots to Mike Trout, if only because in this time frame, it would make Trout a 19-year-old, and Goodyear is divorced, addicted to gambling … naw, it can’t be).

Most is about his agent, the hitting coach, the fans, the ballpark staffers, the ones who chase players, the physical therapist … all their human frailties and desperation, trying to find a purpose and what defines oneself in survival mode.

An excerpt via the publishers’ website gets you into the first inning of work.

An author Q&A

 What was the goal of your book and do you feel it was met?

Initially, I wanted to write about the subculture of spring training, but even more than that, to write about a community and an ecosystem that was at once contained but also big and wild and endlessly fascinating. But I recognized those interests were a bit sociological and leaning toward reportage, so I had it in mind to overlay that exploration with the imagined stories of people who care about baseball and the spring season, for a whole myriad of reasons. Basically, I wanted to write a book that did several things at once. I do feel I met that goal—it took a long time to get all the plates spinning, but I did it.

There’s a great piece by Vanity Fair about your new role at The Paris Review as editor since 2018. Has this new position helped shape this book in anyway, if only in how to get a book done, or what you wanted to accomplish?

I started the book in 2011, and sold it in summer of 2018, right when I was starting at TPR. So the vast majority of the work was done already, though I did a big last edit in 2019 — and that required really tightening my belt to be efficient about my time, given all the responsibilities of the new job. At that point in the process, being a strong line editor by day really helped my evenings and weekends of that last big manuscript edit.
Also, at 36, it’s young, but feels a little “late” for a debut novelist. I’ve been busy with my day job, and tremendously proud of what I’ve accomplished at The Southern Review and now The Paris Review — that work has slowed down my writing life somewhat, and that’s OK.
It took a while to get this right — I first finished a version of this book in 2015, but then took it back to figure out the structure, the casts, and the momentum. Though in another way, TPR did help shape this novel: One of the first books I read when I started out on this sportswriting endeavor was “Paper Lion” by George Plimpton. I loved it, and I think George would be tickled to know that I’m carrying on the tradition of sport literature in my own small way. (Note: Plimpton was one of three who started The Paris Review literary magazine in 1953, established in Paris but based in New York City since 1973. Plimpton edited the review until his death in 2003).
Also, the TPR softball is going strong Continue reading “Day 6 of (at least) 30 baseball book reviews for spring/summer 2020: Emily Nemens’ cactus cooler, as spring training becomes just a novel idea from the ROY author/Ken Griffey Jr. fan” →

“Stealing Home: Los Angeles, the Dodgers,
and the Lives Caught in Between”

The author:
Eric Nusbaum

The publishing info:
PublicAffairs/Hatchette
352 pages
$18.99
Released March 24

The links:
At the publisher’s website
At Amazon.com
At BarnesAndNoble.com
At Powells.com
At Indiebound.org
At the authors website

The review in 90 feet or less

We can reach out and grab this book that came out 20 years ago by photographer Don Normark, who had walked the hills of Los Angeles 50 years prior to that, in the late ’40s, and said he had discovered this place he called a “poor man’s Shangri-la.”

When musician Ry Cooder did a 2005 concept album called “Chavez Ravine,” he used that phrase as the title of one song.

That’s in Chapter 67 of “Stealing Home.” But before we get there, today, we have to acknowledge these truths to be self evident:

Chavez Ravine is a different kind of Shangri-la.

Chavez Ravine may have a Wikipedia page, but it isn’t marked on any L.A. map. Chavez Ravine has no geographic boundary.

Chavez Ravine is “a place, but it isn’t,” Eric Nusbaum writes in the intro. “It is really a code word for the mysteries and pleasures of baseball. It is the metaphysical plane upon which Dodger Stadium exists, slightly outside the realm of daily life in the city. It is a state of mind. It is a vibe. …

“The real history is less like a fable and more like the story of a crime that Los Angeles perpetuated on itself.”

Let that soak in like a long, muddy rain delay.

What is on a Google map, however, is a nub of Malvina Avenue that still exists going up into the Los Angeles Police Department Academy, right off Academy Road. It’s like an appendage.

There are things we know, and things we think we know about this area. There’s the famous array of photographs showing Abrana Archiga’s family being physically taken away from 1771 Malvina Avenue, a home she and her late husband had built in 1922. Online photo archives are full of these shots taken by newspaper photographers at the time.

And now that house is “buried somewhere underneath the distant parking lots of what is now Dodger Stadium,” writes Nusbaum. “It wasn’t supposed to be this way. But it is.”

This is one of several entry points Nusbaum uses to re-introduce many of us to a story that’s been told in various ways, on various platforms, but perhaps not so much from this narrative.

As we have been conditioned, Chavez Ravine can sound like a great place that Vin Scully and others have described to us “in a sort of sweet, folksy way … when Vin Scully says something, it is like God speaking. His voice is ambient in the Southern California air. It is the voice inside your head.”

Perhaps Dodger Stadium is really “a heightened sense of being that you achieve when you visit,” complete with palm trees, and great sunsets and the San Gabriel Mountains … It’s not much different from the game itself, created from mythology by Abner Doubleday and Albert Spaulding, conjuring patriotism and capitalism into ingenuity.

But in L.A., the nasty history shouldn’t be covered over by dirt. And Nusbaum excavates it in a distinct, proficient and prolific manner.

Officially, we learn again that Chavez Ravine, named after a developer Julian Chavez (who didn’t even own that piece of land, but some others by the nearby Los Angeles River), came from an area assigned by the Stone Quarry Hills back in the early 1900s that was actually parts of five sections. It was never a community, per se. It now is something to generically covering what was once the neighborhoods of Palo Verde, La Loma and Bishop.

Neighborhoods that are long gone. Under asphalt, through many people’s faults.

“They were erased,” Nusbaum adds. “First, they were physically erased by powerful forces beyond the control of their residents. Then they lost their names: They became part of Chavez Ravine.”

And in those first few paces, the history lesson begins. Far from an academic lecture forcing the reader to trip over footnotes, citations and other pebbles in the way. It’s a non-fiction story as accurately portrayed as research allows and human empathy preserves.

Why was it this parcel of land used for the stadium, which opened in 1962? What was it originally intended to be? Why didn’t that happen? Each chapter is important in laying the concrete foundation for what came next.

To Nusbaum,  it circles back to the importance of a man named Frank Wilkinson – someone who spoke to Nusbaum’s Culver City High School in 2002 at an assembly and flat-out said: “Dodger Stadium should not exist.”

Nusbaum adds: “There are a million reasons why, yet all those reasons are precisely what give the stadium its power.”

The heroic work of this victim of the Red Scare that who died at 91 in 2006 is the real prize find and personal link in this path, as Nusbaum says his intent is to “provide an intimate look at the journeys and motivations of its principal characters and a sweeping impression of a city and the two countries to which is belonged.”

He feels, and really is, uniquely qualified as a journalist who has worked in the U.S. and Mexico, a native Angelino who believes the story of my city “has too often been told through the gaze of writers perched firmly on the East Coast and peering west as if through a pair of binoculars,” and his desire to work on this ever since that day Wilkinson visited his school.

“The story broke my heart. I struggled to reconcile that Dodger Stadium … which was a source of pain to so many people. … For all its magic, Frank Wilkinson was right: Dodger Stadium should not exist. This book is my attempt to tell the story of why it does.”

It breaks your heart and opens your eyes in the same organic time frame, moved along as well by the fabulous black-and-white dot illustrations by Adam Villacin add to the grit and soul. No photographs are needed as these add to feel of a novel and create an emotional attachment.

As Nusbaum reveals, if this all was creating a plotline for a script to be written about what really happened, we’d need to fill roles for people like Walter O’ Malley, the Arechiga family, Willie Davis, Duke Snider, the Cabral family, Norman Chandler, Clifford Clinton (who started Clifton’s Cafeteria), Ed Davenport, Victoria “Tolina” Augustain, Councilmen John Holland, Ed Roybal and Roz Wyman, Howard Holtzendorff, Joseph McCarthy, Monsignor Thomas O’Dwyer,  Jorge Pasquel, Emil Praeger, Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna and maybe even a lawyer named Phill Silver.

It will also make you think more than twice next time you enter or exit the ballpark when things get back to playing the 2020 season. As you cut through traffic and head down Bishops Road to get to Broadway and escape through the gates of Chinatown. As you maneuver through Boyston Street to enter through Gate C. As you cruise Solano Avenue or Solano Canyon Drive to find a parking spot near the Police Academy. As you go down the Golden State Freeway and look north to the L.A. River. It’s all still there. Echoing.

A Q&A with the author

From his home in Tacoma, Wash., the L.A. native — born in West Hollywood, grew up in Culver City, came back to live here when his wife went to grad school at UCLA — Nusbaum explained how difficult it was to get any publisher on board with this project.
“They thought it was too esoteric, no one would care outside of L.A., but that’s what a book like this faces from those who decide things on the East Coast,” said Nusbaum. “I had been working on a different project, about the history of Los Angeles freeways and did a proposal. The editor liked it but wasn’t sure, but it happened to be they were looking for a ‘Dodger book’ at the time, so I had this one.”

As Dodger Stadium continues a reconstruction project to expand the pavilion seating and create a “front door” to the place, Nusbaum thought the timing was also perfect for the city leaders and team owners to reconcile this history. He explains more:

As you kept pulling out information about on this mountainside, did that compel you to keep digging deeper and deeper? What caused you to stop and then start on this story?

It was hard to stop digging, to be honest. I was researching up until the very end of writing. I don’t think you ever reach a point where you know everything about a subject. But you also make choices when you’re writing a book — and I think a lot of the toughest choices are about what not to include. Continue reading “Day 5 of (at least) 30 baseball book reviews for spring/summer 2020: Chavez Ravine’s newest reveal, without dodging ancient interpretation (and note what’s intentionally missing from the title)” →